Electric Whispers
curated by Maria Rosa Sossai
Electric Whispers examines the significant role of gathering and meeting places for young people living in Lebanon during a dramatic period marked by escalating conflicts. Through her travels to Lebanon since 2023 and the project for a fiction film to be shot also in Beirut, the artist has delved into the youth world to study their virtual and physical meeting spaces.
Virtual meetings in video games and the creation of avatars and fictional identities are often experienced by the new generations as an escape from complex living conditions, while video games become accessible and safe spaces for socialization, where the bursting vitality that accompanies formative years seems to find answers. The places depicted through images by Rä di Martino help to emerge from disorientation and connect us with what, according to Judith Butler, is the task of art: “to alleviate the intolerability of life and allow us to tolerate the intolerable… which does not mean solving it, but relating to it, living with it, examining its contours, its consistencies, reflecting on the mechanisms and methods that allow it to perpetuate itself.”
Electric Whispers is an exhibition conceived for the Italian Cultural Institute of Beirut.
